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Anan, Nobuko (2014) The Rose of Versailles: Women and Revolution in
Girls’ Manga and the Socialist Movement in Japan. Journal of Popular
Culture 47 (1), pp. 41-63. ISSN 0022-3840.
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1Nobuko ANAN
The Rose of Versailles: Women and Revolution in Girls’ Manga and the Socialist
Movement in Japan

I. Introduction
The consumer society with the unprecedented magnitude of the 1970s brought what criticŌtsuka Eijii calls “the big bang of girls’ culture” in Japan, and this contributed to the expansionof the market of girls’ manga (comic books) (Shōjo minzoku gaku 49, 53).ii Girls’ manga,
particularly those by so-called “24 nen gumi” (“The Year 24 Group,” a group of women manga
artists born around the 24th year of the reign of the Shōwa Emperor, or A.D. 1949) became a site
for women to collectively and critically explore their bodies, gender, and sexuality (Ōtsuka
Kanojo tachi no reigō seikigun 221-223). Berusaiyu no bara (The Rose of Versailles), authoredby female manga writer Ikeda Riyokoiii and serialized in a girls’ manga magazine from April
1972 to December 1973, is remembered as one of the icons of Japan’s manga history. It is set in
the time of the French Revolution and revolves around two women, Marie Antoinette and afictional character, Oscar François de Jarjayes. Oscar, a female solider in the Royal Guards,
served as Marie’s bodyguard, but eventually participates in overthrowing the monarchy in the
French Revolution.
One of the reasons that this manga has achieved an iconic status is the fact that it brought
historical narrative into girls’ manga. However, what is more significant is that it provided girls
and women with a stage to experience the life of a revolutionary androgyne who fights tooverthrow the ancient, powerful regime of gender and sexuality. The period when this manga
was serialized saw the development of the women’s liberation movement in Japan, and activists

2
were women marginalized in the new left movement like their counterparts in other parts of theworld. The new left movement in Japan was over with the Asama-sansō Incident in February
1972, in which five male members of the armed United Red Army (URA) were arrested for
occupying a mountain lodge (Asama-sansō) on their flight from the police. However, womenactivists continued to voice their demand for social equality, particularly that of gender and sex.
After the Asama-sansō Incident, the police discovered that URA members had murdered twelveof their comrades because of what they saw as their ideological weakness, and this swept awaysome remaining sympathy in society with URA’s resistance to state authority (Igarashi 120). The
new left’s dream of the revolution died in the carnage, but women did not give up their vision ofa socialist revolution. The revolution achieved in The Rose of Versailles was the revolution
which these liberationists were struggling for.
This manga also epitomizes the tension among women activists between the socialist
consciousness and the pursuit of personal pleasure provided by consumerism in the time marked
by the shift from the “season of politics” to the consumerist society. The Asama-sansō Incident,
which slightly preceded the serialization of this manga, also reflected this shift. The police
stormed the lodge after the fierce battle with the URA, and this was televised live, with theaudience rating at 89.2 percent (Kunō, cited in Igarashi 119). By the end of the 1960s, ninety
percent of households in Japan owned TV sets (Oda, cited in Igarashi 121), a symbol ofconsumerism which was the new left’s ideological enemy. Ironically, the URA’s defeat waspresented to the viewers as a consumable image. Oscar’s revolution in The Rose of Versailles
was after all only possible in this new social climate. Indeed, popularity of this manga, serialized
in a mass-market magazine, led to its reproduction in other media. For example, the theatricaladaptations of the manga by all-female musical/revue company Takarazuka kagekidan (The3
Takarazuka Revue) from 1974 to 1976 broke all audience records up to that point and a film
adaptation by Jacques Demy in 1979 was promoted with a TV commercial of Shiseidō’s red
lipstick worn by starring actress Catriona McColl.iv In the space surrounding The Rose of
Versailles charged with contradictory desires, girls and women activists met.
II. Revolutionary Bodies of Women
The story of The Rose of Versailles weaves together historical facts and fictions. Oscar isbrought up as a successor to her father, General de Jarjayes, because he has no male child.
Although she is open about the fact that she is a woman, she wears male attire and serves Marie
as a commander of the Royal Guards. However, Oscar starts to be aware of the social inequality
in the political upheaval leading to the revolution. She resigns from the Royal Guards and joins
the French Guards as an officer. Eventually, she participates in storming the Bastille with theanti-royalist soldiers of her regiment and helps those in the Third Estate who do not know how tohandle weapons. However, she is shot and dies after witnessing the fall of the Bastille. The Roseof Versailles ends with Marie Antoinette guillotined.
These two women are characterized in diametrically opposite ways. Marie appears as agirl but soon becomes a mother of three children and the mother of France symbolically, while
Oscar is a woman soldier who eventually helps to destroy the ancient regime. Sexuality was oneof the main foci in the women’s liberation movement in Japan, and the activists attempted tointervene in the state’s reproductive control as the legacy of prewar, imperialist Japan (Mackie
164-166). Likewise, sexuality in relation to motherhood was one of the main concerns of girls’
manga in the 1970s. However, in girls’ manga, there was a conflict between the idea that thestatus quo must be accepted and the view that it should be rejected (Ōtsuka Kanojotachi 85). The
Rose of Versailles reflects such tension, albeit in more sync with the liberationists’ resistant4
politics. Marie's love for her children is presented as respectable, but other than this, she isdepicted as an unwise woman. She has no concern for those outside of her small world. All she
does is to idle away her time by wasting the national expenditure on luxuries and thinking of her
love, Hans Axel von Fersen (even though she feels guilty about her affair). While Mother Marie
is not always an ideal character, Oscar is. She is intelligent and keenly aware of social issues.
She becomes more and more critical to the excessively dissipated life-style of the aristocrats andthe unfair tax system, which exempts priests and aristocrats.
Such contrast between Marie and Oscar may seem to be based on the classical genderbinary. Oscar’s social awareness may seem possible because she is granted access to the malesphere, which is, according to her, broader and more meaningful, compared to the female sphere
represented by cosmetics, beautiful dresses, and children (Berusaiyu no bara vol 3v 359-361).
However, regardless of what she says, her critical acuteness does not necessarily come from her
privileged, “male” status. In fact, no aristocrat man around her shares these thoughts.
The Rose of Versailles indeed entails a possibility of transcending a clear gender division,and the most conspicuous marker of this is Oscar’s graphic image. She is presented not so muchmasculine as androgynous, and it is manga’s graphic convention that makes this possible. Manga
has realistic graphics of scenery and props, but its graphic images of people are not realistic andfunction clearly as signs. For example, the shape and the size of eyes signify characters’ sex andage; girls’ eyes are rounder while boys’ tend to be oval, and younger characters’ eyes are bigger
than older ones’. A laughing mouth is suggested by an up-side-down triangle, andembarrassment is expressed by some tilted lines on the cheeks. Such unrealistic ways ofrepresenting human bodies make the visualization of androgyne possible. Except for her
feminine long hair, Oscar’s graphic image stands between those of typical male characters’ and5female characters’. She is taller than other females but shorter than males, and her eyebrows are
thicker than females’ but thinner than males’. Therefore, she looks more masculine whencontrasted to female characters and more feminine when contrasted to male ones (Oshiyama
167). The depiction of her gender and sex are thus not fixed. In this regard, she is free frombodily constraints. Such a character can appear real, not realistic, in the two-dimensional sphereof manga. [Fig. 1]
The contrast between Marie and Oscar is then the one between a mother charged withphysicality and an androgyne without physicality. Of course, the graphic images of female
characters in manga are also not realistic. As graphic images, manga characters ultimately do nothave physicality. The point is that the unique graphic convention of manga can give realness tothe androgyne, who does not exist in the reality. Denial of physicality is an importantcharacteristic of what might be called Japanese “girls’ aesthetics.” As I have discussed elsewhere
drawing from works by Honda Masuko, Kawamura Kunimitsu, and Ōtsuka Eiji, girls’ aesthetics
rejects women’s material bodies defined as reproductive organs and romanticizes“unproductive,” fictional bodies as a way to counter the patriarchal social order.vi Interestingly,
the rejection of body is also a tenet of many new left organizations, but in a different way fromgirls’ aesthetics. As their protests became more violent, activists were required to train theirbodies to the extent of “corporeal privation” (Igarashi 123). For example, the members of the
URA confined themselves to mountain bases, where they trained themselves to become better
revolutionary soldiers. As Yoshikuni Igarashi argues, the URA believed that “[b]odies merely
belonged to the conditions that must be overcome in order to reach the higher goal of revolution”(129). Bodily comfort was considered to hamper such a revolutionary cause and hence wasdetermined as “bourgeois pleasure” (Igarashi 129). This was often stereotypically associated6with materiality/femininity, as the group’s murder cases suggest; a few female members were
executed, because they cared about fashion. Thus, both the new left and girls’ aesthetics arepreoccupied with non-physicality, but while the former associates women’s bodies withmateriality and rejects them as inferior entities to be overcome, the latter challenges such
association itself. Unlike girls’ aesthetics, the liberationists valorized female material bodies
hitherto repressed in the leftist movement, but at the root of girls’ aesthetics and the women’s lib
was the challenge to the gender and sexual inequality including the myth of motherhood.
Girls’ aesthetics originates in the modern period when the school system developed alongwith capitalism. Girls from wealthy families were sent to girls’ schools, where they were trained(or invested) as future “good wife, wise mother,” with their virginity “protected” from theoutside world until they graduated and got married. Under the state-sanctioned ideology of “goodwife, wise mother,” women were expected to give birth to and nurture the future Japanese (male)citizens, who could work for the imperialist project. However, the girls developed their own
aesthetics resistant to such regulation of women’s bodies by taking advantage of the confinement.
As in the case of their postwar successors, what made this resistance possible was girls’
status as consumers. Capitalism enclosed them in schools, but it also opened up a space for theirinternal rebellion. Barbara Sato suggests that the consumerism in early twentieth-century Japanbrought empowerment at least to middle-class women even including housewives who were seen
negatively by girls; as the decision-making agent, these women actively constructed new imagesof themselves and demanded that their voices be reflected in a broader social context opened tothem by the mass media (16-19). Female students also experienced the empowerment as
consumers. Targeting them, magazines started to be published in the 1900s. They officiallyupheld the educational policy for future “good wives, wise mothers,” but the readers used them

7
as sites where they created the exclusive imagined community of those who enjoyed writing andreading stories and poems fantasizing female same-sex erotics and eternally young, beautiful,“unproductive” bodies decorated with ribbons and frills. In their communication through readers’columns, they used fictional names, evoking beautiful images such as those of flowers. Thus, inthe network developed through these magazines, the girls performed fictional selves without
physicality, floating outside of the teleological modern time. In the postwar period, girls’
aesthetics continued in the surviving and newly-inaugurated girls’ magazines, but they weretaken over by manga magazines in the 1950s when the visual media became the center of theentertainment (Yonezawa 54-55). After the “the big bang of girls’ culture” in the 1970s, girls’
aesthetics found a place in girls’ manga, and it became more accessible to the lower-class female
youth.vii
Importantly, the fact that girls’ aesthetics is still found in the contemporary period
suggests that the modern construction of Japanese womanhood still haunts Japanese society. It istrue that the Occupation by the Allied Powers in the immediate postwar period (1945-1952)
brought significant changes in the status of Japanese women. For instance, they acquired
suffrage in 1945, and thirty-nine women became Diet members in 1946. However, these changes
did not mean that the women were completely liberated from the modern gender and sexual
ideology. The state’s intervention in women’s reproductive rights has been ongoing since the1890s by taking various legal forms under the pretext of protecting mothers’ bodies (Mackie
164-165, 192-193).
From the perspective of girls’ aesthetics, in The Rose of Versailles, it is Marie who isconfined to a small world and decorated with ribbons and frills, but it is Oscar who incites samesex eroticism and freedom from physicality. Oscar is indeed a fictional character as opposed to8the historical, real-life figure Marie Antoinette. Girls’ aesthetics is thus differently enacted bythese two characters, but the readers’ letters to the magazine suggest that it was Oscar who was
the target of their erotic sentiments. She was also the object of identification for those who saw
themselves unfit for the traditional female role (Oshiyama 211-214). One reason why the readers
did not care about Marie is because she does not try to turn the confined, surveilled space intothat of resistance. She simply shifted to Mother as demanded by the royalists. On the other hand,
Oscar represents disobedience. She has the strength to change the preassigned space into that of
freedom. Originally, it is her father who trained her as a soldier, but when he orders her to resignfrom the Royal Guard to get married for her safety in the political upheaval, she defies the orderand chooses to remain a soldier. In the end, she uses the skills and knowledge she acquired as asoldier for the purpose of overthrowing the ancient regime.
At the same time, however, Oscar’s life may seem to go beyond the scope of girls’
aesthetics. While she manipulates the given space for her own advantage, she also tries to break
open that space and move into a new world by becoming a part of the force to create a new
history. The resistance in girls’ aesthetics takes a form of remaining unchanged within. The girls
reject adulthood-cum-mother/wifehood by imagining the nullification of the modern historicalconsciousness typified by the teleological progression of time. However, importantly, Oscar diesin the battle. She does not live to see a new age after the revolution. Although she is actually
thirty-four years old when she dies, her graphic image does not exhibit signs of her age. She
looks young and so she dies young. Dying young without becoming mother is one of the
fantasies of girls’ aesthetics, as it is the intervention in the modern, heteronormative, andpatriarchal economy.

9Indeed, as touched on above, The Rose of Versailles abounds in homoeroticism, eventhough there is technically no homosexual relationship in this manga. Female characters often
express erotic sentiments to Oscar. Rosalie, a servant girl of de Jarjayes family, is suffering fromunrequited love toward Oscar. Moreover, an aristocrat girl who is in love with Oscar commits
suicide in order to resist a marriage of convenience. Also importantly, Oscar’s romantic
relationship with André looks male homosexual. It also looks lesbian because he is notstereotypically masculine enough. Graphically, André has more feminine, rounder eyes, unlike
other male characters’ masculine oval-shaped eyes (Oshiyama 197). He is thus to some extent
androgynous like Oscar. In addition, he is a commoner and a servant of de Jarjayes family, andtherefore, he is socially in a weaker position than Oscar. He cannot marry her because of theclass difference, so he does not turn her into wife and mother. She treats him as her equal, but heis portrayed as the one who knows his place.
The sex scene of Oscar and André particularly exudes homoeroticism. The Rose of
Versailles is one of the first girls’ manga which featured a sex scene (Fujimoto 66), but the
depiction of entirely naked bodies was avoided. This in turn contributes to the graphic images
which obscure biological bodies of Oscar and André, especially that of Oscar. What is presented
in a romantic mood is them holding each other in the bed, only exposing their upper bodies but
not Oscar’s breasts. They look like a male or/and female couple. Eroticism in the scene rejects
the conventionally gendered and sexualized gaze. Honda points out that in the girls’ novels of
Yoshiya Nobuko, a lesbian writer who worked from the modern period to the early 1970s,
characters’ lower bodies are obscured, while their facial areas are delineated in great details. She
relates this to girls’ rejection of the identification with vagina-cum-motherhood (Ibunka to shite
no kodomo 191-193). The sex scene of Oscar and André has the same effect. Even though they10have sex, this act is “unproductive.” What emphasizes such unproductiveness in addition to theirgraphic images is that Oscar suggests to André that they have sex for the first time the night
before they leave for the Bastille. She is aware that they may die in the event, and therefore,
there is almost no possibility that their sex leads to her childbirth. Thus, their homoerotic sex isan expression of ultimately pure love that is seemingly contradictorily possible only outside of
the physical realm.viii [Fig. 2]
Another important issue about the couple’s homoerotic relationship is that it is similar to
the romantic, homosexual relationships depicted in a genre of girls’ manga categorized as “boys’love” manga (abbreviated as BL manga) for teenage and adult female readers. BL manga
originated in the early 1970six but was established as a genre in the 1990s. BL does not replicate
actual homosexual relationships, and couples are more like stereotypically heterosexual ones, if
one of the couple is replaced with a woman. There is a fixed role in their partnerships as well as
in their sexual interactions. The ones on top are taller, physically stronger, more assertive, etc.,
and the ones at bottom possess the opposite traits. However, while there is a graphic difference
between the tops and the bottoms, both still look androgynous. This lets the readers/viewers
identify themselves with either one in a couple; they can enjoy both active and passive roles aswell as various ways of sexuality.x BL couples do not usually challenge the conventional
heteronormative power dynamics, but these couples and Oscar/André are similar in terms of theirgraphic images which allow viewers/readers multiple forms of sexual identification. For example,
Mizoguchi Akiko, a queer studies scholar, states that Oscar and André helped her form her
lesbian identity.xi In the 1990s, girls’ manga emerged that dealt with lesbian relationships(Fujimoto 284), but before that, BL was the main genre that openly depicted the same-sex erotics.

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The sex scene of Oscar and André had a tremendous impact on the readers. Manga critic
Fujimoto Yukari recalls the surprise she experienced when she first read/viewed the scene. She
writes that this scene determined the image of sex in the minds of middle and high school female
students around the time. Sex was aesthesized—it came to be regarded not as a daily activity but
as the ultimate way to convey once-in-lifetime love (Fujimoto 68). However, what seems to be
more important is that for this generation of women, homoerotic, bodiless, and “unproductive”
sex became the ideal. Interestingly, in 1989 when these girl readers reached their late twenties or
early thirties, the birth rate marked 1.57, which was the lowest on record up to that point (Ōtsuka
Kanojotachi 234). This is not to claim that The Rose of Versailles is the reason for this, but it issignificant that, as the author Ikeda admits, this manga was consciously produced under the
influence of the women’s liberation movement (Ikeda, cited in Oshiyama 209). Liberationists
sought for more possibilities of women’s bodies. Likewise, Ikeda attempted to go against thesocial structure that did not allow women’s autonomy. She writes that she wanted the French
Revolution in this manga to be “the inner revolution of the Japanese women” in the age when
they could not choose their own lives (Berusaiyu no bara daijiten 146). The Rose of Versailles
was thus one of the inputs that the girls received in the political atmosphere of the time.
The revolution in this manga also reflects the silenced voice of women in the extremist
new left. As mentioned, a few women of the URA were executed because of their “bourgeois
propensity” of wearing make-up, accessories, etc. As Ōtsuka argues, the urge for revolution andconsumerist sentiments coexisted in these women (Kanojotachi 21). However, such coexistence
was not allowed in the URA, and they were murdered.xii As discussed earlier, consumerism
provided girls with space to explore their subjectivity, and this also held for activists of women’sliberation movement. Although they were not entirely supportive of consumerism, they tried to12construct their own worlds with consumable items and images as active agents. They showedattention to their physical comfort and well-being, concern with self-esteem related toappearance, which were satisfied with consumption. Consumerism helped express theiridentities, hitherto marginalized in the leftist movement. For example, Tanaka Mitsu, thestandard bearer of Japan’s women’s lib, fascinated other women by participating indemonstrations all in black including black high heels, not in typical jeans and sneakers (Oguma
715). Women activists of the extremist new left shared such sensitivities with the liberationists aswell as creators and the audience of girls’ manga, but their voices were muffled.
Importantly, Ikeda Riyoko shares a similar experience with these women of the URA.
She was a philosophy major and was studying Marx and Lenin (Takatori 194). She was also amember of the Democratic Youth League of Japan, which was under Japan Communist Party(Takaroti 189). Recalling her days in the League, she complains, “When I attended a meeting ina bright-red suit, they said I was like a bourgeoisie or an aristocrat, and they almost tried topunish me by dismissal from membership” (Takatori 194). However, unlike the executed womenof the extremist URA, Ikeda could demonstrate her feminist politics in The Rose of Versailles,
the stage set by consumerism, as if she heard and took over these women’s muffled voices. In
addition, Tanaka Mitsu once said, sympathizing with one of the two leaders of the URA Nagata
Hiroko, who was arrested before the Asama-sansō Incident: “Nagata Hiroko is myself.”xiii
Nagata had feminist sensitivities in her pursuit of women’s autonomy in the leftist movement(Ōtsuka Kanojotachi 16, Oguma vol 2 546), but they were overwhelmed by masculinism ofanother male leader Mori Tsuneo and the movement itself. She was undoubtedly responsible forthe murder cases in the URA, but still, it is telling that she spent her time in prison drawing girls’
manga-style illustrations (Ōtsuka Kanojotachi 10).xiv It is as if she was trying to tell the women’s

13experiences, which were not heard in the new leftist movement. The Rose of Versailles reflects
not only the desire of the girl readers but also the collective voice of the women who could not
find their space in the revolution sought after by male activists.
In the space created in and through The Rose of Versailles, women experience thepleasure of playing the central role in the revolution. This pleasure gets intensified when Oscar
fights and dies as a martyr in the battle at the Bastille. As Alan Forrest notes, the financial crisis
caused by the French involvement in the American War of Independence was the trigger of therevolution (13), and this manga explains the process accurately. However, for the readers, suchhistorical facts probably did not matter so much. As pointed out above, Ikeda herself intended
the French Revolution here to be the “inner revolution of the Japanese women.”xv She probably
borrowed this historical event in France, simply because the West was admired by girls. The
imaginary West functioned as girls’ dreamland in which they could leave their real lives behind,and this certainly reflected Japan’s national identity constructed in relation to the (imagined)
West since the modern period. Indeed, many girls’ manga are set in Euro-American contexts. In
addition, if the West is often imagined as a “site of transvestism” in Japan as Jennifer Robertson
notes (76), it is a good setting for a character like Oscar.
Ikeda does not bring body politics into her statement about the revolution, but it is crucial
in this manga. The ancient regime here stands for the sexist, heteronormative, and to some extent,
class system. The French Revolution is the final stage of Oscar’s independence from theconventional gender, sexual, class paradigms seemingly contradictorily represented by her father
who raised her as a man. After the middle phase of the story, Oscar’s conflict with him becomes
one of the central issues. General de Jarjayes gets furious when she left the Royal Guards for the
French Guards without consulting him. The readers learn for the first time here in his monologue

14that the reason he sent her to the Royal Guards was because he thought that even a woman canserve as a soldier there in a safe environment (vol 3 127). He is angry because his monitoring ofOscar’s gender transgression failed. In response to her father’s anger, Oscar cries out, “I’m notyour doll!!” (vol 3 126). Moreover, he finds out that Oscar is reading Rousseau and Voltaire anddenounces her as a rebel. To this, she replies, showing her socialist consciousness, “Good books
attract people regardless of class difference. It is natural for human beings to desire to read them”(vol 3 124-125). Furthermore, at a party her father held for the purpose of choosing her husband,
Oscar appears in military uniform and flirts with female guests. She later declares to her father
her decision to live as a “child of Mars” (vol 3 361). At last, when she leaves for Paris to attend
the battle at the Bastille, General de Jarjayes accepts her independence, saying in his monologue,“Go your own way. Follow your passion” (vol 4 301). Thus, the French Revolution becomes thesite for Oscar to demonstrate her final freedom. As a woman soldier without a material body, shefires cannon to the old gender and sexual system that tries to drag her down to the world which
categorizes its inhabitants according to their biological bodies. She also challenges the classsystem by participating in the battle as one of the citizens.
However, Oscar cannot live in a new world. The revolution sets the stage not only for thedemonstration of her independence but also for her heroic death. She fulfills girls’ aesthetics bydying young. By analyzing the graphic images of her death, Oshiyama maintains that Oscar’s
death elevates her to the level of the mythic figure, who transcends the constraint of time (206).
Even before her death, her graphic images often evoke the Greek mythology, and according toOshiyama, this reaches the climax in the scene of her death (205-206). It is typical of girls’
manga to graphically depict non-realistic images (of not just characters’ bodies as discussed
above). A typical example is that flowers are added to the background of characters in order to15enhance the beautiful atmosphere, and it does not suggest that these flowers really exist in thescene. In addition, a character often appears in “disguise”; for example, if a character is thought
to be angelically kind by herself/himself, or another character, or the author, that character isvisualized as an angel in a certain “frame” even though s/he is technically not an angel. (Inmanga, square frames function as something like camerawork in films.) Oscar usually appears in
uniform, but is portrayed in Greek/Roman-style attire when another character praises her beauty,
which is considered by this character to be equivalent to that of the gods in Olympia. Moreover,she is depicted with a Mars-like image when she likens herself to his child (Oshiyama 205). [Fig3] In her death scene, she is accompanied by a figure like a Greek goddess in the background,and Oshiyama writes that this suggests that she has achieved the status equivalent to a mythic
figure (206). In other words, by becoming like a god, she is freed from the existing system,
which obstructs her autonomy (Oshiyama 207). Oshiyama argues that Oscar’s transgressive
gender, and I would add, sexual identity was “sanctified” as the one which will not be threatened
regardless of the time change (207). Her argument is persuasive, except on the point that she sees
Oscar’s trajectory as the growth of a girl under her father’s control to a full-fledged adult. She
associates girlhood with weakness and submissiveness (190). On the contrary, Oscar’s death is agood example of resistance in girls’ aesthetics. To become a mythical figure is an ultimate way
to become fictitious without physicality. Moreover, Oscar’s “deification” confines her to anahistorical space, in which she never grows old and never produces anything.
III. Reactionary Bodies of Women
Nevertheless, Oscar’s fight in the French Revolution is not always subversive. This isbecause the gesture toward escaping the material body with its gender and sexual constraints
transforms the body into an immaterial symbol, one that is available for appropriation by a

16variety of ideologies. Abstraction of the materiality of the body is both liberating and potentiallyentrapping.
One example of negative effect of immateriality in The Rose of Versailles is in its
treatment of poverty in relation to the admiration of Oscar’s status as an aristocrat, against which
she is supposed to rise in revolt. This manga has many episodes about poverty, such as thehunger of people in Paris and Rosalie’s attempted prostitution to support her family. Oscar sides
with these people in the battle at the Bastille and claims herself to be a citizen like them.
However, she never lives as a poor commoner after the revolution. Ikeda herself mentions,“Oscar fought with the common people, but she cannot live as a commoner in dirty clothes”(Ikeda, cited in Oshiyama 206-207). She reduces the episodes about poverty to fashion, and thisis particularly surprising given that Ikeda was a member of the youth group under the Japan
Communist Party. After all, the depiction of poverty as substantial suffering is not the mainconcern of this manga. Poverty functions as image, and it enhances Oscar’s heroic martyrdom.
She is a lofty aristocrat who sacrifices her status for the poor. Ironically, this parallels with thenaïveté of the new left movement around the time, which was primarily by the elite students whoromanticized the working class.
Ikeda’s above statement also reveals the dilemma of women’s consumerist sentiments.
Here is the tension between Ikeda’s red suit and the poor’s dirty clothes. Consumerism provided
her with a space and commodities through/with which she constructed her own identity, but for
her, the working class generically remained just as those in dirty clothes. Yet, in her mindset, she
was somehow also concerned with social equality. The Rose of Versailles exhibits thepredicament of women who had the leftist awareness but found a possible tool to make their
voice heard in consumerism. Indeed, it was one of the works/events which marked the shift in17
the site of political action from class-based street action to lifestyle-based performance, one thatderived much potential from the realm of consumption.
In addition to poverty as image, Oscar’s status as a soldier is also treated as such. Her
activities as a soldier are not really presented in this manga. Even in the scene at the Bastille, thepurpose seems to be the depiction of not the battle but her heroic, aestheticized death. As
discussed above, Oscar’s death empowers girls because it completes her fictionalization.
However, the aestheticized image of a soldier’s death is at the same time disturbing. It is similar
to the masculinist tenet of the extremist factions of the new left, as the activists’ devotion wasmeasured by their “willingness to die for the cause” (Igarashi 123). Moreover, the aestheticizedimage of Oscar’s death, together with her deification, reminds us of rightwing tactics. In the caseof prewar imperialist Japan, the fundamentalism of kokutai (translated as national body or polity)
defined the Japanese as the members of the extended Imperial Family sharing the everlasting
Japanese cultural essence embodied by the Emperor. In kokutai, the Japanese were supposed to
be united within the Emperor’s spiritual body, and soldiers were doomed to contribute to the
expansion of the Japanese Imperial Household. Those who died for the Emperor were deified.
The abstract image of the Japanese body did affect the lived bodies; under the ideology of “goodwife, wise mother,” women were expected to function as reproducers of the Japanese soldiers.
Girls resisted “good wife, wife mother” ideology, but unlike liberationists who critiqued thelegacy of imperial gender/sexual policies, their critique of ideal womanhood did not reach theorigin of this ideal. Rather, girls’ aesthetics and nationalist sentiments could coexist in girls, as
Honda recalls her girlhood when she saw soldiers off to the battlefields with an Imperial Japan’s
flag in her hand while she also enjoyed Yoshiya Nobuko’s novels at home (Ibunka 139). Indeed,
while these two worlds are opposite to each other (national sphere and personal sphere), they are

18
similar in that they were both consisted of idealization, existed in the realm of ideals with its
concomitant sense of non-material.
In the postwar period, the word kokutai is not officially used any longer, but the ideology
survives. Like many other popular media, manga, while providing space for subversive politics,
primarily conveys conservative ideologies. Saitō Minako points out the nationalist tendency ofanime, and this seems to be applicable to many manga works as well, because these two media
share the two-dimensional aesthetics and the audience overlap to a great degree. (The Rose of
Versailles was actually adapted into anime and broadcast from 1979 to 1980.) As Saitō suggests,
anime pieces for boys are usually set in a wartime society where battles with the Others are thecentral activities of characters (18) and the ones for girls tend to have protagonist girls waitingfor Prince Charming with whom they will marry and build families in future (Saitō 32-35).
Of course, some genres of manga such as the one by “The Year 24 Group” do not fit into
this generalized pattern, but The Rose of Versailles betrays ambivalence. It deconstructs theconventional gender/sexual dichotomy to a great extent but exhibits reactionary sentiments, as
demonstrated by representation of Oscar as a patriotic solider. The uncanny lingering of
nationalist sentiments of prewar girls is found here. Oscar often remarks such things as “Ifsomething terrible happens to France, I will die with her” (vol 4 191). Her last words are “Viva,
France…!” (vol 5 25). As discussed above, the French Revolution in this work should be seen as
the stage for Oscar to fight against the conventional gender and sexual construction, andtherefore, it might be better to see her soldier status as a metaphor of her will to overthrow theexisting social structure. It is also important that she is anti-royalist. However, still, beautiful
graphic images of Oscar in military uniform and frequent references to her blond hair and blueeyes could be problematic. Ian Buruma writes that the glorification of Oscar in Takarazuka’s

19theatre adaptation reminded him of “Nazi propaganda staged by Leni Riefenstahl” (121). I
assume that Ikeda did not even imagine that the representation of Oscar comes close to Nazi
propaganda. It is more likely that her and girls’ admiration of the West associated with the
Caucasians (stereotypically represented by blond hair and blue eyes in Japan) and her desire to
depict a beautiful fighting woman unwittingly resulted in something like Nazi propaganda.
However, this does reveal the naiveté of not only Ikeda but also of the Japanese in general.
Japanese education does not teach about Nazi propaganda in history classes, even though Japan
was allied with Germany during WWII.xvi
As a soldier without a material body, even in the scene of her death, Oscar cannot portraythe weight of a dying body. The moment of her death is even decorated by flowers and stars. Her
fight and death are romanticized as images. War propaganda also conceals under beautiful
images the real suffering of dying bodies in the battlefields. Such an image of a patriotic woman
soldier could incite the readers’ minds nationalist sentiments, that is, the idea that even women
can die for the country and such sacrifice is beautiful.xvii Oscar as a soldier even reminds one ofthe predicament of the prewar feminists in Japan. Fighting for the Emperor was the sole means to
be counted as a citizen, and therefore, many feminists considered that women, excluded from theconscription, could only be a part of the nation by (re)producing soldiers. Ikeda mentions that
The Rose of Versailles was influenced by the second-wave feminism, but Oscar’s image as asoldier can be like the visualization of the prewar feminists’ wish for the citizenship granted in
exchange for fighting for the nation.
IV. Conclusion
About two months before the Asama-sansō Incident, the criticism against one of the URA
women soldiers for her “bourgeois, feminine tendency” started in a mountain base. She tried (in20vain) to evade it by claiming that she joined the army to be a “man-woman” (Igarashi 133). She
used this term to deny her femininity, but the term “man-woman” unwittingly seems to challenge
the masculinist new left’s take on bodies. She did not let go of a “woman.” More significantly, a“man-woman” or androgyne circumvents the existing gender and sexual binary. It is as if
anticipating the emergence of Oscar, a revolutionary woman soldier in girls’ manga. A “manwoman” is as preoccupied with the bodiless realm as the masculinist activists of the new left
movement were, but in a different way from them. A “man-woman” is preoccupied with twodimensionality as a way to reject the traditional, masculinist construction of women’s bodies. A“man-woman” finds such a possibility in consumerism. If the new left’s negation of bodies is thenegation of the feminine, a man-woman’s negation of bodies is the negation of the ancient,masculinist regime of gender and sexuality.
Women in different groups in their pursuit of subjectivity meet in The Rose of Versailles.
The revolution in this manga is charged with the feminist consciousness of these women. It also
reflects the multiple, even contradictory desires of these women—rejection of the statesanctioned, masculinist, and heteronormative womanhood, desire to be counted as citizens byfighting for the nation, desire to construct their own identities in a consumerist society, demand
for social equality, and longing for the aristocracy. Oscar swallows all of these. In the eternity
she obtained through her death, she lives as an androgyne, an egalitarian, an aristocrat, a patriotic
soldier, and a child of Mars.
Works Cited
Anan, Nobuko. “Two-dimensional Imagination in Contemporary Japanese Women’s
Performance” (forthcoming in T212 TDR). Print.
Buruma, Ian. A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture. London: Jonathan

21
Cape, 1984. Print.
Forrest, Alan. The French Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Print.
Fujimoto, Yukari. Watashi no ibasho wa doko ni aruno?: shōjo manga ga utsusu kokoro no
katachi. 1998. Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun Shuppan, 2008. Print.
“Heisei 21 nen seishōnen hakusho.” Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, n.d. Web. 22 July,2010.
Honda, Masuko. Kodomo no ryōya kara. Tokyo: Jinbun Shoin, 1983. Print.
---. Ibunka to shite no kodomo. Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 1982. Print.
Igarashi, Yoshikuni. “Dead Bodies and Living Guns: The United Red Army and Its Deadly
Pursuit of Revolution.” Japanese Studies 27:2 (2007): 119-137. Print.
Ikeda, Riyoko. Berusaiyu no bara. 1-5 vols. Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1994. Print.
---. Berusaiyu no bara daijiten. Tokyo: Shūeisha, 2003. Print.
Ishida, Minori. Hisoyaka na kyōiku: “yaoi, bōizu rabu” zenshi. Kyoto: Rakuhoku shuppan,
2008. Print.
Kawamura, Kunimitsu. Otome no shintai: onna no kindai tosekushuariti. Tokyo: Kinokuniya
Shoten, 1994. Print.
Mackie, Vera. Feminsim in Modern Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.
“Midori no hitori goto.” 3 May, 2006. Web. 9 August, 2010.
Mizoguchi, Akiko. “Akogare no Yōroppa. n.d. Web. 18 July, 2010.
Nagakubo, Yōko. Yaoi shōsetsu ron: josei no tame no erosu hyōgen. Tokyo: Senshū daigaku
shuppan, 2005. Print.
Oguma, Eiji. 1968. 1-2 vols. Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2009. Print.
Oshiyama, Michiko. Shōjo manga jendaa hyōshō-ron: “Dansō no shōjo” no zōkei to22aidentiti. Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2007. Print.
Ōtsuka, Eiji. “Kanojo tachi” no rengō sekigun: sabukaruchaa to seigo minshushugi. Tokyo:
Bungei Shunjū, 1996. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 2001. Print.
---. Shōjo minzokugaku: seikimatsu no shinwa o tsumugu “miko no matsuei.” Tokyo:
Kōbunsha, 1989. Print.
Robertson, Jennifer. Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan. 1998.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Print.
Saitō, Minako. Kō itten ron: anime, tokusatsu, denki no hiroin-zō. Tokyo: Village Center, 1998.
Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 2001. Print.
Sato, Barbara. The New Japanese Women: Modernity, Media, and Women in Interwar Japan.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Print.
Shamoon, Deborah. “Revolutionary Romance: The Rose of Versailles and the Transformation of
Shojo Manga.” Mechademia 2 (2007): 3-17. Print.
Takatori, Ei. Berusaiyu no bara eien ni…. Tokyo: Shōbunkan, 1994. Print.
Tanaka, Mitsu. Doko ni iyō to riburian. Tokyo: Shakai hyōron sha, 1983. Print.
Welker, James. “Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: Boy’s Love as Girls’ Love in Shōjo Manga.”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31:3 (2006): 841-870. Print.
Yamamoto, Fumiko, and BL Supporters. Yappari bōizu rabu ga suki. Tokyo: Ōta shuppan, 2005.
Print.
Yonezawa, Yoshihiro. Sengo shōjo manga-shi. 1980. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 2007. Print.
i

In Japanese names, family names come before given names. I follow this order in this paper,

except for names of those who publish in English.
ii

All translations into English are my own, unless otherswise noted.

23

iii

“The Year 24 Group” is not a self-organized group. It is a label used to categorize female

artists around this time who contributed to the development of contents and visual aspects ofgirls’ manga. Hagio Moto, Takemiya Keiko, Ōshima Yumiko, and Yamagishi Ryōko are seen as
representatives, but Ikeda is sometimes included as well.
iv

Images of Shiseidō’s advertisement can be seen on page 76 in Berusaiyu no bara daijiten.

v

Henceforth, only the volume number is specified when quoting from The Rose of Versailles.

vi

See my article, “Two-dimensional Imagination in Contemporary Japanese Women’s

Performance” (forthcoming in T212 TDR). See also Honda’s Kodomo no ryōya kara (1983),
Kawamura’s Otome no shintai: onna no kindai to sekushuariti (1994), and Ōtsuka’s Shōjo
minzokugaku: seikimatsu no shinwa o tsumugu “miko no matsuei” (1989), among others.
vii“Girls” in the modern period meant young women in the (upper-) middle class whose families

were wealthy enough to send their daughters to girls’ schools. However, the category is more
inclusive in the postwar period, as more and more women started to have at least high school
education. In 1970, the percentage of women who went on to high schools exceeded 80 per centfor the first time. See the Japanese government’s report, Seishōnen hakusho.
viii

In her article, “Revolutionary Romance: The Rose of Versailles and the Transformation of

Shojo Manga” (2007), Deborah Shamoon argues that The Rose of Versailles is important because
it depicted the adult heterosexual relationship in girls’ manga, “which tends to favor homosocialand homosexual relationships” (4). She further states that the piece is yet “a compromise
between the adolescent world of dōseiai (“same-sex attachment”) and the adult world ofheterosexual romance” (8). This is based on the biased assumption that the same-sex attachment
or erotics is the escapist desire of those who cannot become adult, that is, heterosexual.

24

Moreover, her argument makes it sound that the majority of girls’ manga is concerned abouthomosocial and homosexual relationships, which is not the case.
ix This type of manga was originally categorized as “shōnen-ai” manga. The literal translation ofshōnen-ai is “boy love,” but what is now referred to as “boys’ love” (BL) is not always the samewith shōnen-ai. There is no space to explain the difference in this essay, but for more
information, see Yamamoto Fumiko and BL Supporters’ Yappari bōizu rabu ga suki (2005).
x

In her discussion of the early stage of BL manga, Ishida Minori also points out that byidentifying with boys, women can experience both the subject and the object positions (98-100).
However, she draws from the representation of homoeroticism in literature and does not discuss
the visual images of manga. In addition, Nagakubo Yōko suggests the same type of pleasure thatfemale readers experience in reading BL novels (290).
xi

See her online essay, “Akogare no Yōroppa.” Also, in his article “Beautiful, Borrowed, andBent: ‘Boys’ Love’ as Girls’ Love in Shōjo Manga” (2006), James Welker offers a lesbian
reading of representative BL (more precisely, shōnen-ai) manga in the 1970s and 1980s.
xii

Mass media circulated a view that these women were killed because of jealousy of Nagata

Hiroko, one of the leaders of the URA as she was said to be not attractive in the standard way.
What is less clear is how her feelings were shaped by her own struggles within the masculinist
society of Japan and student movements. For a more complicated reading of her motives, seeŌtsuka Eiji’s Kanojotachi no reigō sekigun (1996, 2001) and Oguma Eiji’s 1968 (2009).
xiii

See her her book, Doko ni iyō to riburian (1983).

xiv

She died of illness in prison on February 5, 2011.

xv

However, it is important to note that early feminist consciousness was born during the French

Revolution in France. There was a group of women who demanded the right to form a female

25

unit of the national guard, although the request was ignored. In 1793, a group of militant womenestablished their society, the Club des Citoyennes Republicaines, for the purpose of securing
food. Olympe de Gouges published a pamphlet, “The Rights of Women” in 1791, demandingthat women gain the rights equal to men’s (Forrest 102-103).
xvi

It should be noted here that BL manga sometimes finds homoeroticism in Nazi images. There

are several BL manga which feature Nazi members as characters. One might argue that thehomosexualization of Nazis challenges its persecution of homosexuals in some ways, but thisdoes not seem to be the case. Girls’ manga writers who initiated BL often list Luchino Visconti’s
film as their source of inspiration (Ishida 141). For them, his films are “romantic,” while male
literati such as Mishima Yukio see the political protest in his The Damned (1969), which is about
the steel industrial family manipulated by the Nazi Party (Ishida 126-154). Mishima consideredthat the film contrasted sexually “normal” males to “abnormal” ones in the “abnormal” politicalsituation and that being “abnormal” was a “genuinely human” response to this “abnormal”
regime. On the other hand, girls’ manga writers used Visconti’s films as sources for recreating
romantic European atmosphere in their works (Ishida 141). They observed the details of items in
his films, such as lace attached to dresses.
xvii

In Jacques Demy’s film adaptation, Oscar does not fight in the battle and therefore she does

not die. Many fans were disappointed by this change, as one of them writes in her blog, “Oscar
must die as a solider who protects citizens!” See “Midori no hitori goto” (Midori’s Monologue).